Leander Moss did not make a scene in that corridor.
I have thought about that a great deal since, because he had thirty-six years of reason to.
He walked up to her. Quite slowly.
She turned round, because everybody else in that corridor was looking at something behind her, and she saw him.
And I watched a woman of sixty-three recognise a face she had not seen since 1990, in about half a second, and I watched every single thing about the way she was standing change.
She let go of my wrist.
He did not say anything clever. He said her first name. Once. The way you would say it to somebody you used to know.
And then he said: he’s got it, Philippa. The baby’s got it.
That is all. Seven words.
She did not deny it. She did not say anything at all. She stood there with that folder in her hand for about four seconds and then she walked out of that corridor and got into the lift, and she did not come back that day or any other day.
Tobiah was standing about six feet away.
He had heard all of it, and he did not understand one word, and I watched him not understand it.
And then Leander looked at him — properly, for the first time — and put one hand up to his own forehead, to the white patch over his eyebrow.
And I watched my ex-husband, who has checked his reflection in every window he has ever walked past, put his own hand up to his own hairline.
It took him about eleven seconds.
He did not say anything either. He took the application out of his jacket, looked at it, and put it back in his pocket, and then he sat down on one of the plastic chairs along that wall and put his head in his hands.
That application was never filed.
The folder under my mattress went to Harrowgate and Vell the following week — to a woman I used to work with, who read the first four pages and rang me back inside an hour.
The divorce was settled in the June, and it was settled on terms that I am not going to set out, and they are fair, and the house is sold, and I have a flat and a car seat.
The companies that exist on paper and nowhere else are now somebody else’s problem, and somebody else is being very thorough about them.
